Making presentations and conducting meetings are important aspects of many occupations. Executives make presentations to directors, managers conduct meetings with staff, salespersons make presentations to potential customers, doctors conduct meetings with nurses, lawyers make presentations to juries, and so on. A great many professionals conduct and attend meetings and presentations regularly. Much effort therefore goes into creating and delivering effective presentations and preparing for and conducting effective meetings.
With specialized software, conventional personal computers provide effective platforms for creating and conducting presentations and meetings. Currently available presentation program modules can turn a personal computer into a customized presentation system for creating, delivering, and printing slide presentations. Generally described, these presentation systems provide a specially designed, user-friendly, palette of tools to assist in the creation of presentation slides to be subsequently displayed to an audience. These presentation systems also allow the slides to be sequentially presented to an audience, point-by-point and slide-by-slide, with color, animation, audio, and transition effects that enrich and enliven the presentation.
After designing the color presentations, the user may also want to print the color presentations so that the audience may have personal copies for note-taking during delivery of the presentation and for future reference. Because providing color versions of the presentation is usually expensive, oftentimes, the user provides black and white versions of the color presentations. The conversion process and printing process are supported by the presentation program modules.
In some presentation program modules, a standard process is typically used for converting the color presentations to black and white. This process converts any color picture to a gray scale rendition, which is a conversion of color images to varying shades of gray. For color presentations, however, a simple gray scale conversion is generally inadequate because presentation images frequently have a dark, and sometimes complex, decorative background. Fades, filled objects, and backgrounds, which look great on an on-screen color presentation, are often unreadable in the form of a printed handout. As a result, other computer printing systems supported by presentation program modules have been designed to provide improved conversion methods for color presentations.
One method implemented to provide an improved translation from a color presentation to a black and white presentation is preparing special black and white templates, which are used as substitutes for the colors from a color template. One problem with this black and white conversion is that it creates a new black and white presentation that can greatly vary from the color presentation. Another problem is that when the user makes custom changes to the black and white presentation, there is no way to preserve the color and black and white versions in synchronization. Also, there is no automatic method for deriving a customized black and white version so that it can be re-derived whenever necessary as edits are made in the color version.
Another method used provides a black and white checkbox in the print dialog box of a screen display for supporting print operations. In response to selection of the checkbox, the program supports an automatic conversion of a color presentation to black and white. This conversion employs a gray scale conversion for the color presentation. The text is printed in black and white, and the program determines the best black and white conversion based on the type of art to be converted. The problem with this method is that the user has no control over the black and white conversion operations. Also, the user cannot see the conversion to black and white before printing the presentation on a printer.
One additional method for converting color presentations to black and white omits any complex backgrounds and replaces the complex backgrounds with a white background. Color images are converted to black and white images. One drawback with implementing this method is that when text is printed in any color other than black and fills are colored, the text and fills do not print well in black and white.
A user needs flexibility in converting complex color presentations, as well as the ability to see the conversions as they are implemented on-screen. It is usually preferable to change a complex background to white and reduce it's complexity. Foreground figures and text typically print better in solid black. Other figures, like pictures and company logo types, are better rendered with a standard conversion to gray scale.
Therefore, there is a need for a system that allows more control over converting a color presentation to black and white. There is also a need for a system that allows images, objects and text on a page to be converted item-by-item. Furthermore, there is a need for a system that allows the black and white version of the color presentation to be viewed as each item is converted to black and white before printing the presentation. Finally, there is a need for a system that provides a variety of modes for black and white conversion of a color presentation.